Yeah, Yeah, Agentic AI—What You Really Need To Know, Who's Making It Happen

Forbes

2 days ago

Everything changes now–AI agents in advertising are a practical tool, and then some. They just might portend a power shift in ad tech away from platforms and to agencies and brands that know how to use them
Breakneck speed revolutions in AI systems, neural interfaces and internet machine learning are about ... More ads creation and about the future of power in the digital marketplace
Shopify CEO Toby Lütke ignited a small HR firestorm when he sent an email to employees saying there would be no new hires if AI can do the same thing: 'Reflexive AI usage' is now a 'baseline expectation,' he wrote. 'What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?' Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce, also raised eyebrows when he penned an op-ed in the WSJ declaring that today's CEOs 'are the final generation of executives leading exclusively human workforces.' Plenty of other CEOs are also telling employees to embrace AI or face becoming obsolete.
With over 82% of global companies reporting they are actively using or exploring AI, there's ample evidence that the future belongs to companies and employees that are AI fluent and that means availing themselves of these AI agents, stat. It also means that much of the debate on which companies are most powerful, and supposedly 'needed' government intervention, is now shifting to another plane, from the global media platforms to local execution at the agency and brand front.
If agencies and brands can activate their own agents and AI capabilities, they could we have the potential to challenge the power of the platforms, which would theoretically lose their ability to be the most important intermediary between brand and consumer. The old truths are dying as agencies get more, if you will, agency with agents. As people rely more and more on AI for recommendations, challenging the search environment we've lived in for years, on everything from product purchases to trip planning, your most important customer (and employee) may be AI.
As most in the business know by now, an AI agent in its simplest definition is a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data and use the data to perform self-determined tasks. Like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Llama or any of the other large language models that interact with natural language prompts. Humans--for now--set the goals, but an AI agent independently chooses and performs the best actions to hit those goals. BTW… Sounds a lot like programmatic, right? And yet, of course AI agents can do much, much more.
Tasks that used to require constant human oversight and weeks of work and tuning can now happen almost in real time with machine-level precision.
So, while much of the media conversation around AI these days centers on the arms race around LLMs and AI chips, both of which are increasingly commoditized, the real revolution from the media side is shaping up to be in AI-driven agents.
With agents, in-house marketers can suddenly take a team of thirty or forty down to a team of four to do the same thing. Scary? Yes. Real ROI? That, too. And if you are not thinking about this yet, you can be sure your brand competitors are.
One of the leaders in the emerging agent space is Jellyfish, part of the Brandtech Group, which has a suite of media-buying tools for streamlining advertising workflows with AI agents, also available for marketers who want to in-house media operations with an agentic edge. Jellyfish also leverages other AI-as-a-service tools in the broader Brandtech portfolio like Pencil which uses LLMs to develop ad creative. A suite of other companies has emerged in this space too including LinearB, Swarmia, Jasper AI and Typo to name just a few.
Jellyfish is leading practitioner of ad agents
Jellyfish, which is known for being an integrated digital marketing agency, started building its own agents in early 2024 and has been deploying AI agents for clients since that same year. The company says it now sees faster time to launch (65% improvement), lower average campaign infrastructure costs (22%) and, the kicker really for a success metric, an average improvement in campaign performance of 30%.
Additionally, the entire Brandtech Group has integrated for instance Google's advanced video generation models, Veo 2 and now VEO3, into Pencil, its generative AI marketing platform. Japan Airlines, a Jellyfish client, was the first brand to leverage this partnership, developing AI-generated inflight promotional films that will be shown on seat backs on select flights. From initial concept to final production, the entire creative process was completed in under 15 hours by a combined team from Jellyfish and Pencil. It would have likely otherwise taken weeks, if not months, and much human intervention.
This is all happening at Jellyfish and at other agencies and brands as VEO3 has come to capture the 'OMG WOW' imagination of the entire digital ad population–with the phenomenon exploding beyond the creative side of the industry and with articles and YouTube videos proliferating.
That real-time reality for the wow-factor is driving a real appetite for in-housing AI agents so brands and agencies can keep up with the possibilities of AI and creative.
'The biggest mistake that most brands are making with AI at the moment is to think it's something for the future, and agents are no different. They are here and now! The difference between generative AI and everything else we've had from a marketing technology standpoint over time is that everything else has been a tool whereas this isn't a tool, it's an actual intelligence.'
David Jones is a leading light in the remaking of advertising for the age of agents
David Jones, founder and CEO of the Brandtech Group, has a track record for spotting the future early so it's no surprise that his company is at the vanguard of AI agents and advertising.
'When we launched the company in 2015, we said you could do all marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology and AI,' Jones told me. 'Back then, it was a vision–today, it's a reality, whether it's the ability to create content at scale that's 62% faster, 55% cheaper and with 40% better ROI, or the ability to apply agents, which are giving remarkable results. Using agents, we've cut campaign launch times by 65%, reduced infrastructure expenses by an average of 22% and increased campaign performance by 30% across multiple clients.
'The biggest mistake that most brands are making with AI at the moment is to think it's something for the future, and agents are no different. They are here and now! The difference between generative AI and everything else we've had from a marketing technology standpoint over time is that everything else has been a tool whereas this isn't a tool, it's an actual intelligence. The best way to think about agents is that we've just invented a new hyper-intelligent species, more intelligent and more capable than humans. Ask yourself the question: how many of them do you have on your team?'
Nick Emery, CEO, Jellyfish, says agents transform marketing and provide, "Endless relevant invention ... More and focused automation."
Nick Emery, CEO of Jellyfish, added:: 'Our media agents were the last piece of our AI marketing system. We spent 2024 reinventing every aspect of marketing through AI from insights to creation, from activation and measurement. To realize the potential of real-time creativity and infinite mixability, clients need a whole new AI framework and that's what we have. This transforms marketing, destroys siloes and delivers what every marketer wants–efficiency, effectiveness, growth and instant customer relevance, engagement and sales. Endless relevant invention and focused automation. It's a new world for progressive marketers.'